Author profile

Sally Thorne

Australian author Sally Thorne writes romantic comedies built around rivalry, attraction and eccentric characters. Her debut novel, The Hating Game, became a film starring Lucy Hale and Austin Stowell.

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About Sally Thorne

Sally Thorne is an Australian romance writer based in Canberra. Her first novel, The Hating Game, was published in 2016 and established her as a USA Today bestselling author. She followed it with 99 Percent Mine, Second First Impressions and Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match.

Thorne is best known for romantic comedies in which friction becomes intimacy. The Hating Game places Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman opposite each other in a shared office, where professional competition, elaborate mind games and mutual attraction are difficult to separate. Second First Impressions shifts that tension to a retirement community, while Angelika Frankenstein Makes Her Match recasts the formula as a historical, Gothic-tinged comedy inspired by Frankenstein.

The Hating Game was adapted as a 2021 film directed by Peter Hutchings, with Lucy Hale as Lucy and Austin Stowell as Joshua. The screen version retains the novel’s publishing-house setting and its central contest: two colleagues pursuing the same promotion while their antagonism turns romantic.

The Hating Game is the natural starting point. It introduces Thorne’s taste for close-quarters rivalry, sharp exchanges and characters whose private vulnerabilities complicate their public battles. It is also the WebToTell title and the book that first brought her work to a wide audience.

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The Hating Game

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman are executive assistants at Bexley & Gamin, a publishing company created by a merger whose unresolved tensions are embodied in their shared office. Lucy is personable, colorful, and eager to be liked; Joshua is controlled, intimidating, and seemingly impossible to please. Their mutual hostility has hardened into a daily ritual of staring contests, mimicry, insults, and strategic victories. When both become candidates for the same promotion, their private contest acquires professional consequences: each refuses to work beneath the other, and losing may mean leaving the company. Yet attraction increasingly disrupts Lucy’s certainty that she understands her rival. Told through her witty, intensely subjective perspective, Sally Thorne’s debut novel turns workplace competition into an enemies-to-lovers romantic comedy about misread signals, vulnerability, ambition, and the unstable boundary between antagonism and desire.

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